Sunday, March 06, 2011

World's Largest Jailer By Far, It's Not Even Close

Q: Which repressive country puts the most people in jail for violating government laws?

A. Iran

B. Saudi Arabia

C. Libya

D. Egypt

E. United States of America

It's not even close..............

World Rank, 2010

Country

Prisoners per 100,000 Population

1

U.S.A.

743

37

Tunisia

297

52

Turkmenistan

224

53

Iran

223

61

Libya

200

61

Mexico

200

69

Colombia

180

70

Saudi Arabia

178

92

Bahrain

149

116

China

120

126

Venezuela

114

137

Iraq

101

140

Ethiopia

98

150

Egypt

89

156

Yemen

83

185

Syria

58

187

Afghanistan

56

198

Sudan

45

198

Pakistan

45

The table above shows how the prison incarceration rate for in the United States (per 100,000 population) in 2010 compares to some of the roughest countries in the world. The full list of 216 countries is here, the countries above were selected as some of world's the most repressive regimes (Iran, Saudi Arabia and Libya), some of the world's least economically free countries (Venezuela, Turkmenistan, Sudan, Afghanistan, according to the Heritage Foundation) and some countries with the biggest narco-terroism problems (Colombia and Mexico). But none of them even come close to the incarceration rate of the World's #1 Jailer - the United States, largely because of the "war on drugs" (see chart below).

60 Comments:

Most of these countries the US is compared to are lawless. You commit crimes and can expect to get away with it. Many of these countries have extreme punishment for crimes. Offenders will disappear after being arrested. This is not a fair comparison.

Conservatives love poritanism. Modern progressivism is the merger of old puritanism with socialism. Both love to tell other people what to do and are more than willing to use state violence enforce their views.

Most of these countries the US is compared to are lawless. You commit crimes and can expect to get away with it. Many of these countries have extreme punishment for crimes. Offenders will disappear after being arrested. This is not a fair comparison.

There may some truth in what you say. I once tried to report a crime to the LAPD, a station on Venice. They really tried to not take my report. Back when they were trumpeting the success of their anti-crime efforts.

On the other hand, some experienced observers (such as city newspaper reporters who are tight with LAPD) say the murder stats are clean. And they have been going down.

I will tell you this: 25 tears ago, unionized LAPD homicide detectives often complained about being overworked, not being able to devote enough time to each crime etc. Now murder rates are down by three-quarters, and...they complain about being overworked, not being able to devote enough time to each crime etc.

Still, I think long-term incarceration of bona-fide criminals (not participants in victimless crimes) makes sense...or putting them on an island somewhere, where they can engage in productive work, but stay offshore.

The US is not blessed with large islands, other than Hawaii...and they shoot Hawaii-50 they, so I guess that is out....maybe we can send them to Cuba....

"Robberies and violent crimes made up 75 percent of all reported crimes in Sweden last year, which added up to around 900,000. Police managed to solve 5.8 percent of them.

Bengt Svenson, the national police chief, defended his department saying: “There is often very little of value to work with. When it comes to theft, there are no witnesses, and victims often don’t know when the crime occurred. There’s really not much to go on and that obviously makes it hard to solve crimes.”

Justice Minister Beatrice Ask feels the figures are an unwelcome truth for a government that ran on a platform on crime reduction. When elected, the government promised to have 20,000 police on Sweden’s streets by 2010.

Ask feels that part of the problem lies with Sweden’s culture. “I think it has to do with the culture, the idea that there is simply nothing that can be done.” At any rate, Ask says she feels the statistics are rather disturbing and that the Swedish police could do more to clear up these cases."

I wonder how these United States compare on other statistics, like "conviction rates", "recidivism", "success of appeals", "time spent jailed prior to conviction", "time spent imprisoned after conviction" etc. And then State-by-State for all these.

Black and Hispanic inmates together make up 62 percent of the prison population.

(My comment: may explain why Canadians have fewer inmates).

Canada has a lot of minorities, including many blacks. We find that it is not race but income and education that are more important factors. Of course, our justice systems work somewhat differently. In the US a black man who commits the exact same crime as a white man is a lot likely to go to jail.

46 percent of inmates were incarcerated for a violent offence.

You still fill your jails with people who have committed victimless crimes.

On the other hand, some experienced observers (such as city newspaper reporters who are tight with LAPD) say the murder stats are clean. And they have been going down.

I would not dispute this. The demographics predicted this trend quite some time ago. If you abort potential murderers you are likely to get fewer murders 16-20 years later. But the problem is that the laws ensure that there will be many more murders than would take place without them. If the US legalizes drugs the gang wars will be much milder. After all, you don't see employees of Wal-Mart and CVS killing each other so that they can gain market share.

That kind of statistic is just a waste of time. First, we are talking here about less than 1% of the population in jail. Assuming that even for the most philanthropic person every society will have about 10% crooks this is an acceptable number. Second, in the well-faring European countries you get away with parole for most of the things that give you jail in the US. The range goes from drugs to assault with a weapon. Comparing legal systems with statistic data does not help to understand them. But it sure helps to blame the US one more time. What would the world do without this evil country.

Sierra Leone is #201 on the list and Liberia is #202 on the list. Is there any correlation between being lower on the list and people being safer from crime. Looking at the list, it doesn't appear to be the case.

Nonsense. Those countries do not have the same number of stupid laws that try to regulate human behaviour even when there is no victim.

You are also ignoring the fact that reporting methods and standards are set locally, not nationally. Given the political incentives in the US I would say that the US under-reports more crimes than many other developed countries.

The same as the standard definition. A Victimless Crime, which is also called Consensual Crime by some commentators, is any action that does not do any physically harm to a person or to property, or which was consented to, but is illegal because of statutory laws. Common Law would not prohibit or punish such an act but legislative law makes it a crime.

Examples include:

Using drugs.

Selling drugs.

Getting drunk.

Selling liquor.

Prostitution.

Adultery.

Premarital sex.

Homosexual acts.

Polygamy.

If there is no victim because the individual performed the act to his own body or with a consenting partner who agreed to the act there should be no crime.

But this is either an outright lie or an illogical statement. Reporting of crimes varies greatly within the US. There is no personal experience that can be representative of general crime reporting. And the same is true of reporting in most foreign countries. The counties or provinces have standards that also vary and are applied inconsistently.

That said, the homicide rates are reported fairly consistently everywhere because each jurisdiction reports how many people were killed in an incident. When you look at the murder rates you see the US with a significant lead. The US shows 5.0 murders per 100,000 versus 1.8 for Canada, 1.46 for Malta, 1.4 for Kuwait, and 1.3 for France. It seems to me that you made up the statement and can't support it.

Once powerful nations want a U.S. that's submissive, apathetic, and government-dependent to gain power in the world community. They want their best and brightest to stop fleeing to America.

By all means ignore the data in the hope that the myth of American exceptionalism is real. Well, it isn't. What made America the greatest country in the world was a system that protected individual rights and left people alone. The reported incarceration numbers are a symptom of the disease that progressive statists on the Right and Left have nurtured.

ahh, appeals to personal anecdote, the last refuge of a guy unable to make his case with the facts.

I am not as negative of personal experience as you are because sometimes the official data is so bad that it is valid to bring up personal experience as a way to ask if the story passes the smell test. But in this case personal experience cannot be a factor because no one individual can have such an experience given the differences in compliance to different reporting standards and the effectiveness of gathering the reported data.

Our friend's statement fails the smell test because we do know that the murder rates are reported fairly consistently and that those reports support the claim made by Mark's posting.

What bothers me are that so many people would deny the obvious because they want to believe and hang on to their mythology. That is not a good way to go through life.

I mean, my god, I could advocate for more individual liberty, abolition of America's draconian drug laws or legally own a gun or something. Doesn't anyone see what a threat to society I am???

Sadly, most people on this thread are statists from the Right or statists from the left. One group would put you in jail for smoking in your own home. The other would put you in jail for owning a gun. Both are opposite sides of the same totalitarian coin.

Sierra Leone is #201 on the list and Liberia is #202 on the list. Is there any correlation between being lower on the list and people being safer from crime. Looking at the list, it doesn't appear to be the case.

First, poor countries can't afford to jail 1% of their adult population as the US seems to want to do. Second, do not confuse the low imprisonment rate with low crime rates or low punishment rates. Many countries use customs, Sharia, or Common Law systems and as such concentrate on justice and compensation of victims, not punishment. Their legal systems would rather have the offender pay off his debt to the victim or victim's family rather than jail him and support him for a particular period of time.

If I break someone's arm in a fight I might have to pay him a camel in Somalia because customary law dictates that I compensate the victim. The same 'crime' might get me 90 days in jail in the US but the victim gets no compensation.

"I am not as negative of personal experience as you are because sometimes the official data is so bad that it is valid to bring up personal experience as a way to ask if the story passes the smell test"

i agree with your views on the smell test, but it i see this nonsense all the time where someone says "well, i didn't see that in india" and i'm left stunned that after such a tiny bit of totally non representative experience (as the average american tourist moves in very different circles than the average denizen of mumbai) that they now claim to have "personal experience" about the place. generally, it's just a sign that they have developed an opinion and have no interest in even knowing the facts.

and yes, clearly our friend must be telling porkie pies about his "personal experience" as it seems implausible that he has seen many crimes go unreported in even one or 2 countries much less a representative sample set along with a baseline of US practices against which to compare it.

my original point was that his statement looked outlandish and likely lacked any actual factual basis. thus far, i have seen nothing to convince me that such is not the case.

i agree with your views on the smell test, but it i see this nonsense all the time where someone says "well, i didn't see that in india" and i'm left stunned that after such a tiny bit of totally non representative experience (as the average american tourist moves in very different circles than the average denizen of mumbai) that they now claim to have "personal experience" about the place. generally, it's just a sign that they have developed an opinion and have no interest in even knowing the facts.

While I do not disagree, I was talking about something different. Let me provide you with an example.

When I worked in China the commentary here was about how hard the Chinese farmers had it and how poorly they lived. While that was partially true in a number of locations there was something important that those of us on the ground noticed. Many of these so called poor farming communities seemed to have large TV sets, little service businesses that provided food, entertainment, and other services to customers that were obviously willing to pay for them, and many construction sites in which some very nice looking homes were being put up.

The analysts, who only looked at the data, never picked up some of the activities that were obvious to those on the ground who were paying attention. Instead of looking at the process and trying to figure out how the government was reporting business activity and what the compensation rates really meant in after-tax, after-living-expenses purchasing power the analysts were doing a straight conversion and assuming that all things were equal. No analyst who looked at the compensation rate for my secretary would ever guess that she lived better than a typical middle class worker in the US. That analyst never saw the fact that her reported salary was after tax and that it did not include utility payments, rental payments, food subsidies, free daycare, insurance coverage, bonuses, etc. Or that her husband earned the same after tax and that he worked a bit on the side to earn a few more bucks that somehow were never aggregated because the government had no way to pick up data in the service economy. When some of us did a little exercise and counted service providers on our drive home we figured out that the government data could not really include at least 50% of all service output. That meant that the economy was probably larger at the time than was being reported, which explained why China was using so many more tons of iron, coal, copper, than would be expected given the official reports.

The same was true when my wife and I went to Thailand. While everyone was telling me how 'hot' the country was the empty buildings told me that the bubble was about to burst for a while. The same may be true of China now. While I have little trouble with some of the empty cities in certain areas where economic activity is going to explode I cannot figure out how one can justify the extreme speculation on very expensive real estate in some cities where housing costs are ten times the current family annual wage even though the quality of construction is questionable. This is why I have been selling most of my base metal stocks and added more gold, silver and energy exposure. (I hedge of course by adding a few base metal warrants here and there but that is a subject for a different type of thread.)

my original point was that his statement looked outlandish and likely lacked any actual factual basis. thus far, i have seen nothing to convince me that such is not the case.

I agree. The statement failed the smell test because he cannot know what he claims to know. And as one person pointed out in a discussion a while ago, if there is one thing that we know with any degree of certainty it is that crime in the illegal community is significantly under-reported.

It's possible, 1% of Americans are criminals and most of them are in jail.

In a country like Pakistan, 5% or 10% are criminals and 1% of them are in jail.

I think that Americans are no less likely to have criminal intentions than Pakistanis. The major difference is the justice system, not human nature. In the US the victim does not matter as much and the state looks to punish by jailing the guilty. In many other countries the victim gets priority and the criminal is forced to pay compensation as punishment. Jail is too expensive and does little for the victim so it would be a low priority option.

Most of the best and brightest in Europe moved to America long ago. Now, most of the best and brightest come from other countries, e.g. India, Venezuela, Mexico, etc.

That was true when America was the land of opportunity that allowed those that worked hard to get rich by keeping most of the capital that they accumulated and when government as a percentage of GDP was very small. But now that has changed and the US is just another bureaucratic state that has passed laws to prevent its best and brightest from leaving the country and taking their capital with them.

VangelV, I knew a classmate from Keyna who lived very well in the U.S. with no income.

When I first saw him in school, he was wearing some type of turbin and robe. However, within a few weeks, he was wearing jeans and a t-shirt watching college and pro football and drinking beer every weekend (rooting for the Denver Broncos and Colorado Buffaloes).

His government never sent him the monthly checks for school, and his government asked for his return plane ticket, which he sent. He was stranded in America, and lived with a friend from Africa for free, who was an accountant, and also shared his meals.

Everytime I saw him, he said "Hey, Art, do you have any coins?", and his roomate complained he always "had his hand out." I often gave him money and it seemed the African blacks who visited adopted me (although, I'm white).

After a year, I said to him, "You should write a book on how to live in America with no money," because he actually lived well. He always had a place to sleep, food, and went out with friends, who helped him. Also, the university forgave his tuition and helped him in many ways with school.

I'm not confused. This is the point I was making with my post. Crime and punishment are two very different things in the world that aren't necessarily related. I think we are in agreement on this one.

It reminds me of the old British story of two men getting shipwrecked on an island. They don't know where they are or who the people on the island are. Before seeing a person they enter a village and the first thing they see is the gallows. One looks at the other and says, "Thank God! They are civilized." Uncivilized societies have no real justice systems (i.e. Sierra Leone and Liberia).

Let me get this straight...zero point seven percent (0.7%) of the US population has been found guilty of a crime and incarcerated and this means the USA is repressive??? Come on, you're kidding right? Also does anyone believe the stats out of Iran??? I bet there are thousands of political prisoners not counted...same goes for China. This is just more bleeding heart spin from the left.

Also does anyone believe the stats out of Iran??? I bet there are thousands of political prisoners not counted...same goes for China. This is just more bleeding heart spin from the left.

The US has a huge number of people in jail when compared to Canada, France, England, Sweden, Germany, Japan nor any other developed nation that you want to look at. That is a fact that has no left or right wing spin on it.

Holding 1% of your population in jail is not cheap. That means that taxpayers have to pay for prosecution, appeals, incarceration, parole services, etc., etc., etc. A big chunk of the prison population is in place because of the prosecution of victimless crimes that add up and make the individuals who are jailed in a much worse position than the general population. It makes no sense to have Bush, Gore, Clinton, and Obama smoke pot without persecution while some unlucky bastard gets jailed fro doing the same thing, and having his life ruined because of the stigma that comes with having a record.

You're so incredibly pathetic in your naivete morganovich and vangeIV that its almost funny...

I guess that you must be naive to see that the US has a murder rate that is three times that of Canada or France and not notice that murders are not being reported properly in France or Canada as they are in the US.

"I guess that you must be naive to see that the US has a murder rate that is three times that of Canada or France and not notice that murders are not being reported properly in France or Canada as they are in the USpolitically incorrect' convictions meanwhile physical assaults and property damage go both unreported and unpunished when a particular 'protected' class commits the crime...

Samething in Canada...

BTW the US population has three times plus the population of both Canada and France combined...

It's also interesting that the prison population grew significantly since Ronald Reagan expanded the war on drugs.

Absolutely. All American Presidents have been cowards on the drug question and not a single one of them has ever stood up for the right of the individual to do what s/he wishes to do with one's own body.

If the US was so repressive, why are you allowed to publish this garbage.

On some issues the US is the greatest defender of liberty on this planet. The problem is that it fails on others because the state tries to be a nanny that tries to prevent idiots from doing harm to themselves. While that may seem noble it has unintended consequences because the efforts lead to more harm to more people, many of whom would never choose to do harm to themselves.

In a free country idiots would be allowed to use drugs if that is what they wished to do. They would not be jailed for consensual acts because some Puritan wants to feel better about doing supposed good for 'the community.'

BTW the US population has three times plus the population of both Canada and France combined...

Sheesh!

It does not matter because when grown-ups discuss murder rates they mean murder rates not the number of murders. You might try a math class because you seem to have trouble understanding what you are reading.